RIM pins hopes on BlackBerry 10 (with video)

Vancouver developer centre part of push to reclaim tech throne

Chris Gibson, buyer for the electronic division of London Drugs, offers a tour of the new Blackberry 10.

The focus of all the excitement sits on a desktop looking a little like — well — an iPhone. Only a bit bigger.

For a small device, this smartphone has a huge assignment — saving a company.

Research in Motion is pinning all its hopes on the new BlackBerry 10, and it’s taking a page from Apple, which has transformed the smartphone from a buttoned-down business phone to a must-have consumer item in a few short years.

If you’re looking for that old BlackBerry staple, the physical keyboard, you won’t find it — at least not on the developer model that I was playing with. But its specs, including an onscreen keyboard similar to the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy SIII, pretty much match the first BlackBerry 10 model to be released tomorrow.

A QWERTY keyboard version is coming and RIM is promising at least six different BB10 devices by the end of the year.

To launch programs and navigate around, the swiping motions reminded me of the Galaxy. And RIM is addressing the multi-tasking madness that has beset our increasingly mobile world with its ‘Peek’ feature. Apps that are running in the background can be viewed by swiping across the screen, left or right, back to what you were doing.

Side-by-side with the iPhone, it was a tad taller — although when I pulled up Vancouver Sun pages on the web browser for a comparison, I didn’t notice a lot of difference either in screen resolution or real estate.

Tomorrow morning’s launch will be cause for celebration in Vancouver, where Research in Motion is opening a developers’ centre — one of only three in North America.

The new centre is located at Wavefront, the Vancouver-headquartered Canadian Centre of Excellence for Wireless Commercialization and Research where start-ups and more senior companies test and develop apps for all wireless mobile platforms — from Apple’s iOS to Android, Windows, BlackBerry and others — and connect to wireless carriers around the globe.

Later tomorrow, some 200 developers will gather at Wavefront to celebrate the opening of the BlackBerry Tech Centre there, an event that Wavefront president and CEO James Maynard describes as an acknowledgment of Vancouver’s significance as a centre of wireless innovation.

“We have a very strong technology community here that thinks mobile,” he said. “In terms of the mindset and the talent, we rank really highly in the world, so I’m glad that BlackBerry has recognized that in terms of putting the centre here.”

Its Vancouver centre will be Research in Motion’s hub for the entire Pacific Northwest, not just Vancouver.

“This is a Pacific Northwest footprint so that means invitations are from Oregon north to come to this event, it’s not just a Vancouver thing,” Maynard said in an interview Tuesday.

“I think that is significant — why did they come to Vancouver as opposed to dropping into Seattle or Portland?”

The other two BlackBerry centres are in Kitchener, Waterloo and Santa Clara, California. Maynard said with Wavefront also having a presence in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, it can offer RIM a link to developers right across the country.

“They can roll one program through us and we can reach the developer communities across the country as well, so it gives RIM great leverage,” he said.

The BlackBerry centre is actually a room filled with computers. But within those walls will be the test devices developers need, plus computers and the software for developing apps and porting applications over from other mobile platforms.

“There will be RIM people here, not full-time, but there are RIM-dedicated developer resources that will be here in addition to the hardware and software systems that they provide,” Maynard said.

That ability to port applications — meaning a developer who has an iOS app can relatively easily create a BlackBerry 10 version — is a key point in the new BlackBerry 10 platform, said Maynard. With earlier BlackBerry operating systems, the process was long, complicated and costly.

Another strength Maynard suggested that will serve RIM well in the rollout of BlackBerry 10 is its long-standing relationship with both enterprise customers and with wireless carriers.

“They have unbelievably strong relationships with hundreds of carriers around the world, which means their distribution — I mean assuming the product holds up as billed and we’re hearing it’s pretty good — it means that they’re going to be able to,” said Maynard, pausing a second before he continued: “hopefully they’ll survive.”

While RIM was a pioneer in the smartphone market and once a leader, its market share has dwindled considerably. Despite the decline, Maynard pointed out that BlackBerry still enjoys strong market share on several continents. In North America, Apple iPhone battles it out against smartphones running the Android operating system, with Samsung topping the competition.

“If you go to Indonesia, India and Africa, BlackBerry is the premier brand,” said Maynard. “So BlackBerry in North America is viewed through this North American-centric Apple- and Google-dominated lens.

“When you go globally — are they growing as fast as the other guys? No, but they’re holding their own. I don’t think it’s as doom and gloom as people would put it out to be.”

“I think Canada suffers from a dearth of major multinational technology anchors and the growth of an ecosystem is dependent on having successful multinational-headquartered anchor tenants,” he said. “So I think that for Canada and the ICT structure, BlackBerry needs to survive.”

While the BlackBerry centre seems a coup for Vancouver, it represents only a part of Wavefront’s growing operations. The non-profit started in 2009, taking up half a floor in the Guinness building in downtown Vancouver, with a staff of seven and a handful of start-ups sharing space and taking advantage of Wavefront’s testing and usability services.

Today, Wavefront has expanded to fill one-and-a-half floors in the building. It has 32 employees, 30 companies on-site and 2,000 member companies.

“We have become a strategic go-round between the multinationals looking for innovation connectivity and the ecosystem right across the country, in addition to what’s happening here in Vancouver,” said Maynard.

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